by Emily Gertz,
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The future impacts of global warming may be twice as worse as we thought just a few years ago.
If current emissions trends continue, there’s a very high probability that by century’s end, the Earth’s median surface temperature may increase 9.3 degrees F (5.2 degrees C) over average temperatures between 1981-2000, according to a team of MIT researchers .
In the Arctic, where climate changes are amplified, temperatures could rise as much as a median 20° F — at which point the death knell for the Arctic ice cap and the Greenland ice sheet will have long sounded.
This is an update to a 2003 study made using the MIT Integrated Global System Model, which predicted an increase of 4.3 degrees F (2.4 degrees C). Initially released in February, yesterday the new research was published in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate.
Rubayat Ahsan
